A BALKAN SATIRIST AT PLAY

In the past few decades, Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has emerged as one of the leading writers of the Balkans, although here in the U.S., where translations from the Albanian are not that common, Kadare's reputation has been slow to grow. With the publication of The File on H., it may happen that some serious American readers will turn their attention to his work.

That wouldn't be a bad thing. Kadare is an extremely interesting writer with a complicated past. Having flourished as a first-rate artist under the communist regime in his native country, he used his talents to critique and satirize the very commissars who supported him. If a hysterical letter he recently wrote to The New York Review of Books in response to a favorable essay about his work is any indication of his state of mind, the complexities of his years under the Albanian dictatorship may be wearing on him.

But such complexities only contribute to the density and paradoxes of his latest novel to be translated here. The publishing history of the book is itself a bit perplexing. The File on H. first appeared in Albanian, in 1981, and then in a French translation in 1989. A revised version of the French text (revised, presumably, by Kadare himself, who was by that time living in exile in Paris) came out in 1996. This English translation was rendered by David Bellos from the revised French version.

You would think such a series of veils between us and the original would take away some of the novel's pleasure. But the book still retains great vitality and life, and if as you read you disregard a few odd-sounding colloquialisms, you are in for a very good time. The H. of the title stands for Homer. This exotic story, set in the mountainous back lands of Albania in the early 1930s, is loosely based on the experiences of the American academic expedition led by Harvard classical scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord, an expedition that traveled to the Balkans to study the links between modern oral poetry and the Homeric epic.

Kadare tells half of this story from the Albanian point of view, satirizing provincial government officials and their patchwork teams of informers, a ridiculously inept bunch who view the Western scholars as enemies and spies. After all, the two men carry with them as part of their equipment a new machine that the Albanians call "a taperegorder," and seem to want to snoop into the lives of some citizens of the mountains. The blindness of state bureaucrats, the boredom suffered by their lonely wives and the peculiar quality of life in general in an out-of-the-way nation ruled by a king whose name in English means "bird" make for a lot of comic moments.

Juxtaposed against this comedy are scenes from the Harvard expedition's field work. We get to read pages from their notebooks, lifted in ridiculous fashion by one of Albania's leading _ and rather bumbling _ secret agents. In these passages we hear how the two scholars, known as Bill and Max, come face to face with Albanian rhapsodes _ singers who recite from memory local 12,000-line epics in the Homeric tradition.

These rhapsodes are rather dour guardians of this great tradition. They wear special costumes, strike dramatic poses, and when Bill hears one of them recite a poem for the first time, it has a distinct physical effect on him. "He tried to follow the meaning of the words, but the monotonous delivery of the singer made that impossible. It felt as if he were being emptied from inside, as if his guts were being drawn out of him, as if his inner being were slowly being wound along a woolen thread turning on a distaff. The rhapsode's voice had the ability to hollow you out."

Kadare's satire doesn't create anything like this effect. But then it doesn't aspire to epic heights. It is nevertheless quite entertaining. And as the two scholars move toward a confrontation with Serbian nationalists who are outraged by the Harvard experts' focus on Albanian epic only, the story takes a rather serious turn, with some lessons for contemporary students of the mess in the Balkans.